News

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA—The West Virginia University College of Law awarded degrees to 110 graduates on May 13 in a ceremony at the WVU Creative Arts Center.

The Class of 2016 includes the nation’s first LL.M (Master of Laws) graduates in Forensic Science.

Joshua Weishart, who was selected Professor of the Year by the Class of 2016, delivered the commencement address.

“You have proven that you have what it takes not only to be attorneys at law, but, more importantly, persons with empathy, passion, and different conceptions of what justice entails,” he told the graduates.

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA — Anne Marie Lofaso, professor of law at the West Virginia University College of Law, has been named an associate of the Oxford Human Rights Hub (OxHRH) blog.

The OxHRH bring together academics, practitioners, and policy-makers from across the globe to advance the understanding and protection of human rights and equality. It is based at the Faculty of Law (law school) at the University of Oxford in England.

As an associate, Lofaso creates blog series, recruits scholars to write about human rights issues, and edits blogs. Her first major project for the OxHR blog was a review of the human rights legacy of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. She is currently working a project to establish awareness of human rights abuses in Appalachia. 

Lofaso is the Arthur B. Hodges Professor of Law at WVU. Since January, she has been serving as the Keeley Visiting Fellow at Wadham College and as a Senior Academic Visitor at the University of Oxford Faculty of Law. She returns to the WVU College of Law in the fall.

Professor Valena Beety is the recipient of the 2015-2016 Significant Scholarship Award at the West Virginia University College of Law.

Beety, an associate professor of law, won the award for her article “Judicial Dismissal in the Interest of Justice,” published last year in the Missouri Law Review (Volume 80, Issue 3). In the article, Beety examined the capacity of judges to grant clemency, or dismiss cases, in the interest of justice.

According to Beety, most of the country’s 1.6 million inmates are serving sentences for non-violent offenses. She argues that by making judges more accountable, they can dismiss some cases based on overzealous prosecutions, race-based patrolling, and the overuse of “three strikes” laws.

Beety looked at factors such as community impact, prosecutorial misconduct, safety and welfare of the community, and a conviction’s effect on public confidence in the criminal justice system. She proposed reform of the criminal justice system and practical assistance for individual cases and lives.

This week, I and 14 other law professors from West Virginia University sent a letter to U.S. Sen. Shelley Moore Capito, R-W.Va., urging her and her Senate colleagues to vote on the nomination of Chief Judge Merrick B. Garland to the United States Supreme Court. 

      The letter to Senator Capito 

Writing in our individual capacities as West Virginia citizens and as legal scholars familiar with the Constitution and its separation of powers principles, we ask that Senator Capito urge Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Chuck Grassley to hold hearings and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to schedule a vote on whether to confirm Chief Judge Garland’s nomination. The Senate should move now to fulfill its constitutional duty to decide whether to consent to the president’s nomination.

The Appointments Clause states that the President “shall nominate, and by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, shall appoint … Judges of the Supreme Court.” The “Appointments Clause” appears in Article II of the Constitution, which sets out the powers of the Executive branch. (A separate section, Article I, pertains to the powers of Congress.) The Constitution clearly gives the President, not the Senate, the power to appoint Supreme Court justices. The Senate’s role is limited to advice and consent. That role cannot be understood in a way that strips the president of his constitutional appointment power.

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA—Last week (March 30, 20156), President Barack Obama granted clemency to 61 federal prisoners. Three of them are clients of student attorneys working in the Clinical Law Program at the West Virginia University College of Law.

“To obtain a Presidential pardon on behalf of a client is a once-in-a-lifetime moment and experience for any attorney,” said Valena Beety, associate professor of law and director of the West Virginia Innocence Project at WVU. “For our law students to have accomplished this feat is incredible; I am proud of our clients for who they are, and proud of our students for the hard work they put into their petitions and advocating for their clients.”

Third-year law student Adriana Faycurry (left) worked with Dwayne Walker, a man who was 24 years old when he was sentenced in 1997 to mandatory life without parole for selling crack cocaine.  Walker has been a model prisoner who writes children’s books, creates plans for a non-profit for inner city kids, and has multiple vocational certifications. 

Faycurry drafted Walker’s executive summary and clemency petition with assistance from Beety and Italia Patti, the Franklin D. Cleckley Fellow at the College of Law. 

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA --  Patrick McGinley, the Charles H. Haden II Professor of Law at West Virginia University, is the 2016 winner of the Svitlana Kravchenko Environmental Rights Award.

The award recognizes McGinley's "work as a legal scholar, teacher, and public interest environmental litigator [who] has been committed to the rule of law, speaking truth to power, mentoring law students and lawyers and empowering families and communities marginalized by discrimination based on race, wealth, and ethnicity."

The Land Air Water, the nation’s oldest and largest student environmental law society at the University of Oregon, presents the award annually at its Public Interest Environmental Law Conference.

McGinley has been a leader in environmental law during a career that has spanned more than 40 years. Among his accomplishments, he litigated —- and won —- the first mountaintop removal case; he represented a citizen’s group that preserved the Cranberry Backcountry in West Virginia’s Highlands as federal wilderness; and he is a leading authority on the Freedom of Information Act.

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA—West Virginia University College of Law Professor  Vince Cardi has been elected to The American Law Institute (ALI).

Founded in 1923, the ALI is a nonpartisan organization that produces scholarly work to clarify, modernize, and improve the law. Its membership is limited to 3,000 individuals “who reflect the excellence and diversity of today’s legal profession.” There are only seven ALI members in West Virginia.

The WVU Bowles Rice Professor of Law, Cardi began teaching at the College of Law in 1967. His expertise includes bankruptcy law, commercial law, legal drafting, sale and secured transaction, and contracts law. He is a former recipient of the  West Virginia University Foundation Award for Outstanding Teaching.

Cardi serves on the West Virginia State Election Commission, the West Virginia Commission on Uniform State Laws and the national Uniform Law Commission. For more than 20 years, he has been a member of the  West Virginia Law Institute Governing Council. He has also worked with the Southeastern Association of Law Schools, the American Bankruptcy Institute Law Review Advisory Board, Legal Aid of West Virginia, and the Ohio River Basin Energy Study.

Cardi received his bachelor’s degree and J.D. from Ohio State University and earned his LL.M. from Harvard University.

-WVU-

MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA — A new book by WVU Law professor Michael Blumenthal chronicles the life and work of conservationist Rita Miljo, who was known as “the Mother Teresa of Baboons.”

In 1989, Miljo founded the Centre for Animal Rehabilitation and Education (CARE) in South Africa. Based on the edge of Kruger National Park, CARE is the world’s largest rescue and rehabilitation center for Cape baboons. 

In 2007, Blumenthal volunteered at CARE and began a deep and unusual friendship with Miljo: he, the son of Holocaust survivors, and she, a childhood member of Hitler Youth. 

Before she died in a fire in 2012, Miljo entrusted Blumenthal with the telling of her story. “Because They Needed Me: Rita Miljo and the Orphaned Baboons of South Africa” (Pleasure Boat Studio, 2016), is drawn from Miljo’s journals spanning 30 years.